After more than 100 years of holding the land beneath the Hyatt Regency Waikīkī, the Steiner family has sold their six parcels to Texas-based Montgomery Street Partners for $215 million. That’s right, this wasn’t the hotel, just the dirt under it, making this Waikīkī’s largest land sale in years.
For those unfamiliar: in Hawaiʻi, some of the most valuable land, especially in Waikīkī and urban Honolulu, is owned by large trusts like Kamehameha Schools, Queen Emma, Lili‘uokalani Trust, or by longtime family landholders like the Steiners. They lease out the land, and others build on it, and while the building often changes hands, the land under it usually doesn’t.
This setup isn’t just for hotels. Plenty of residential buildings and shopping centers sit on leased land, too. Owners control the structure, but not the land beneath it.
When the lease ends, if you can’t strike a new deal, you’re basically out of luck. Unless, of course, you can figure out how to move a building.
Who Are the Steiners? (I had no idea, so I found out)
The Steiner family’s Hawaiʻi roots begin with James Steiner, who arrived from Bohemia (current day Czech Republic) in 1882 and rose from waiter to landowner. By the early 1900s, he had picked up prime parcels in downtown Honolulu and Waikīkī, including the land beneath what would become the Biltmore Hotel, which was demolished in 1974, then redeveloped into the Hyatt Regency Waikīkī. According to PBN, they also own the land below the AC Hotel in downtown Honolulu.
As discussed in previous issues, hotels can sometimes be a tangle of owners and operators: one group can own the building, another manages the property, and another owns the flag. And sometimes the land itself belongs to yet another party, adding one more layer to the puzzle. I am exhausted just writing that!
